


johnny, i hardly knew ye

by OfShoesAndShips



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen, implied traumatic childbirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 02:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9858002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfShoesAndShips/pseuds/OfShoesAndShips
Summary: An account of Black Joan, John Childermass, and the paradox of selfishness.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired in part by wolfinthethorns's amazing fic, An Unkindness of Absence, and by cuervoymatine's beautiful, eerie writing style. Thank you both for such amazing works.

She promises herself that she will be selfish. Loudly, fiercely, arrogantly selfish. He is _hers,_ hers alone, her son her boy _hers_. It was her who held his tiny, blue body to her chest and screamed into every realm she could to entreat the world to let her keep him, until he opened his once-dead eyes and joined in her howling.

And every day since she has gone to war, for herself, for him, storming her own streets with her hands re-learning how to steal and her eyes stubborn, iron-cold, and every day since she has come home to him with all that she could get, as paltry as it was. She sings to him, small soft songs in the tongues of his ancestors, and when he, his toddler’s voice already Yorkshire to the bone, asks what they mean she tells him. She goes slowly through the words until she has taught him every word of Hindi she remembers from her grandfather’s quiet stories and her mother’s anger, and she listens when he repeats them and refuses to let herself cry.

He is the spit of her mother, as she herself is, and she tells herself that she will be selfish. She will teach him who he is, teach him how to own himself, and she will teach him how to be several things at once because no-one had taught her and it is too hard a thing to go through alone. She will make him in her image, and she will do it better than before.

When he is four, a friend of hers dies with a babe his age. She’s managed him; she can manage another. When he is six, she has three. When he is eight, she has five. She can’t afford any of them but she teaches them her trade and she takes up her old job in the pub on the corner and their tiny room is full up with other people’s mending and she scrapes out something, just barely enough. When John is old enough for dame school she tuts over his tatty waistcoat and buttons it with a tight, pinched, tearstained expression and sends him off with debts mounting up behind her and she is selfish, she is selfish, she is selfish. They are hers, they are all hers, and she will shove them into the world as prepared as she can and when John comes home reading he teaches the other children and offers to teach her, too.

She says no. He has a chance. She doesn’t. She is selfish. He will be what she wasn’t. And he will carry her name with him, straight into the pages of history.

He asks if she’s sure, in Hindi, and her smile in response is weak and wobbling. She still says no, but it’s a softer, more painful thing.

He is twelve. He has his letters and a little Latin, even, and he comes home talking of the Raven King. She brushes his hair, thick and black in her hands like hers had been before she’d sold it, and jokes that it could be feathers. He laughs with her, but softly, as if he has taken that into himself and held it close against his heart.

 

-

 

_“John?” asks the midwife, with a smile, “Like the King? It’s a good choice.”_

_“No,” says Joan, brittle with youth and pain and the baby in her arms, “Like me. Like me. Like me.”_

 

-

 

He is twelve. Her debts have become too many; she feels them dragging at her every step. She can barely keep up; she manages, they manage, but the workhouse seems bigger every time she passes it, casting deeper shadows.

A cousin of a friend runs a gambler’s den. She’s played poker there once or twice, when food was scarce, and it’s as good an idea as any.

Except it isn’t, because this once she loses.

She loses, and she falls into the weight of her debt.

 

-

 

The bailiff turns up to the door on a cold, foggy afternoon. She knows, when the knock comes on the door, and she opens it with her face hard. She is selfish. She is selfish.

 

-

 

_"We wouldn’t want anything to happen to your boy, now, would we?” his voice is low and too-warm, and his hand flexes where he’s holding the doorframe, boxing her in with his bulk._

_She promises anything of herself, except the money. It isn’t enough. It isn’t-_

_And then she remembers. She cannot be selfish, now. And in the quiet of a Yorkshire slum a gunshot bellows._

 

-

 

He is twelve. He is kneeling on the fresh earth of a pauper’s grave, screaming into every realm to bring her home.

But she is silent.

 

 


End file.
